May 21
I am teaching a bunch of online courses for the next 5 weeks. It is lots of work, but it is very exhilarating because it is graduate students (and they are smart and make me think), and I spend so much time writing. I write emails, discussion topics, blog entries, comments, feedback, texts, instant messages. It feels like it won’t ever end, but then it is over, and I am primed to write a chapter or article or something because I just feel like writing. It just so happens that the courses deal with two of my favorite subjects: digital writing and delivery and medical/health writing. More as the summer goes by.
May 01
So much for my experience in documenting work this semester. I have several posts in the works that I hope to come back to. Today I am working at Panera, and I am reminded about how much I can get done when I am not on campus. It is truly amazing the number of interuptions that can happen during a day. Today, I am compiling publisher agreements for the edited collection, Stories on Mentoring, due out in August. I am also grading papers, finishing my annual report, meeting with the administrators of the Office of Economic Development, collecting final projects, thinking about my summer courses, my new role as Director of Undergraduate Studies, the department website, and the cruise we leave for on Saturday, May 10.
Feb 29
I spent the last week of February helping my colleagues learn to use Sedonaweb, which is a self-service web database application that allows faculty to record and document their teaching, research/creative activity, and service. It is a new system, and while entering information into the system is fairly user-friendly, the pre-defined activities and categories–for the “work” we do–is causing interpretative issues. While it doesn’t seem to matter where faculty put things this time around since it is the first time, and kinks will need to worked out, the administrators will be disappointed in the aggregation of information because the categories and activities were not standardized across the university, colleges, or departments.
Feb 22
I spent the last week in meetings. I had two faculty meetings, an IRB meeting, Faculty Senate, Personnel Committee, and a meeting with the College of Business folk about the business writing meetings. Exhausted…
I am trying to figure out the purpose of meetings. There’s communication and there’s work that gets done, but in academia, sometimes it is just talk, and that ultimately in the larger scheme of things, seems like a waste of my time. Not all of the meetings make me feel this way. Some are productive or they seem productive, but then I don’t know. I am going to observe my time in meetings more closely to see what “work” they do.
Feb 14
I looked at the last several weeks of my calendar to see what I have been doing. I have had the opportunity in the last several to observe the teaching 3 of our fixed-term faculty and their classes. I haven’t taught freshmen since I came to ECU in 2002, and I have done a couple of observations through the years but mostly in business writing course. I haven’t announced this to my colleagues, but I have really enjoyed observing these classes, the teaching, the learning, and the students.
After observing the classes, I write up a peer observation review, and the instructors use these observations in their annual reports and teaching portfolios. This is what I have been working on for the last couple of weeks. I am really good at agreeing to the observations and showing up for their classes on time, but I am not nearly so effective at getting these documents to them in a timely manner. I am working on this.
I have also spent the last several weeks working on several letters of recommendation. For the most part, this are also easy to say yes to but harder to get done although I am getting there.
Feb 05
I was trying to figure out a way for my graduate students and I to be able to work on the same list of content for a funding resources database we are designing for small towns and non-profit organizations in eastern NC. This is part of the work we do at the ECU Outreach Network. I found just the thing we were looking for at FlexLists.
FlexLists is a web application and a place to share lists, and is created by MovingLabs.
Pretty Sweet!
Jan 23
A full day (literally) of meetings on- and off- and back on-campus. Today was an interesting IRB meeting at the hospital with two very innovative research studies.
Jan 23
Happy MLK Day!!!!
As of 2006, 730 cities in 39 states had streets named after King.
No courses today so I am trying to catch up…we’ll see how it goes…
Jan 18
This week I turned off my automatic alert for email on my office computer. I had no idea how these little interruptions throughout the day added up. I still check it fairly often because I don’t want it to pile up. Now I just need to get to the point that I shut it down for a couple of hours a day. Baby steps…